Habitat for Humanity is always working for the people

Hannah Edwards, Community Outreach Coordinator for Habitat for Humanity of Key West and Lower Florida Keys, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about their projects.

Habitat will be part of the Masquerade March for Fantasy Fest tonight.

Edwards said, “For the past few years we’ve had one of the stops on the Masquerade March. So we put up a booth at 908 Eaton Street, which is a private residence of a Habitat supporter. So we set up there, and we have the free shops, but we also sell cocktails to make a little money for Habitat. So it’s fun. We always dress that up. This year, we have decided to do builder Barbies. So we were dressing up as builder Barbies and construction Barbies, and we made a cute piano and but, that’s a fun, fun costume. And we’ll be selling spicy pink margaritas, and we all have pink shots and also have other beers and wine and beverages. Take a picture with us. We’d love to see everybody tonight.”

Habitat always has projects underway.

Edwards said, “We’re super excited that we are about to close on our four homes in Cudjoe. We’re calling this little four home development Cudjoe Shores. It is just north of the square grouper. We have our Moss Landing development, which we finished prior to that is just south of the square grouper, so they’re kind of all one big community there in Cudjoe. These four families have been working very hard, and they are super excited to close. We’re looking at November 6 for their closing date. Hopefully it all goes according to plan. You know how these things are, but we’re very excited. They’re very excited. And then they’ll be homeowners. They worked really, really hard. It’s really amazing. I have one family this is the third time they applied, and it was their credit that was keeping them back and they took our credit class, and they worked really hard, and they brought their credit up 100 points, and they’re going to be homeowners. So that is very exciting.”

Sweat equity is part of owning a Habitat home.

Edwards said, “They have to spend 200 to 300 hours working before they can buy their homes and that’s working on the construction site, working on their homes, doing the painting, doing landscaping, putting up lattice underneath the homes, all the little details. They also are taking classes along the way. We offer classes in a lot of things to help them get prepared for home ownership, the financial stuff like budgeting and credit and debt management, as well as conflict resolution, to help them be good neighbors, home maintenance so they know how to take care of their home landscaping in Florida. That’s a really fun class that I’ve added with the help of the Extension Service, which teaches them about Florida friendly landscaping and native plants and several other classes. They’re all really good. Estate planning, which is courtesy of Sam Kaufman, all sorts of good, good knowledge, and many of those classes are open to the community. So we’ll be starting new classes sometime in the next month or two, once we have selected our next round of families, which we are also currently working on.”

There are more than 100 applications that have been submitted for five available homes.

Edwards said, “The application process is very intense. People submit the application itself, and then they have to provide a lot of supporting documents, all forms of identification, bank statements going back three months, paycheck stubs going back two months, utility bills, credit card statements, all sorts of stuff. Then we comb through all of that. We’re looking at their income in two different ways. We need to make sure that the total household income fits in the income bracket that we serve, which is we are only allowed to go up to 80% of the area median income, and that’s a number determined based off of a HUD number, and then the county sets their limits based off of the HUD numbers. They change in April each year. So that makes it always challenging, too, if we’re in the middle of this process and then the numbers change. So then we have to look and make sure that they don’t make more than the 80% but they make enough to be able to pay their mortgage payment. So it’s a window where they can’t make too much, but they have to make enough, and that can be very frustrating, because we would love to serve everybody. It’s really sad when you have this great applicant and they make $1,000 too much. It’s so frustrating. I hate telling them no, but unfortunately, that’s how the program is structured. I just wish that there were options for people that make between 80% of AMI and 140% of AMI in this town or this area. But there just really aren’t many.”

Volunteers for Habitat are always needed.

Edwards said, “We have a lot of committees that really help us get the work done, and they are all volunteer. I have about 18 people on my family selection and support committee, and those are the folks that are helping me now with this process. They can choose what part of the process they want to help with. So I have some that help me go through the applications. I have a couple of mortgage professionals on my team that are really good at helping me with the credit analysis and the underwriting part. Then I have some great folks who enjoyed going to the applicant’s homes, because once they get through that income qualification into the next phase and then they go through their credit and background checks, then we go and visit them in their home and have an interview. So I have two committee members that go to each of these final applicants homes and interview them. That looks like we’re going to have about 20 couple families in that stage. So, that’s a lot of committee members, and they work hard. We’re looking for volunteers to be on our committees. We have other committees too. We have construction and land acquisition. We have a finance committee, we have fundraising and events committee, all sorts of committees. We’re always looking for help with that. We also can use help on the build site. We could use help in the office. There’s all sorts of ways you can help. So if you’re interested in giving back to the community and helping to keep affordable homeownership opportunities happening here, please reach out to us. It’s a really fun thing. We actually have some volunteers tomorrow morning who are some of our county commissioners, so they’re going to be helping us on a critical repair job in the city of Key West. So that’ll be fun to have them see a little bit of what we do and help out. It’s going to be really fun at 9:30 in the morning on Fantasy Fest Saturday.”

The mini golf tournament will be on Sunday, November 17.

Edwards said, “You can still register. You can still sponsor. So that’s a fun, family friendly event. We had a lot of fun with that last year. You can have a team costume. There’s a prize for that. We have all sorts of prizes. So it’s just a fun event. Low key, lots of fun.”

For more information, click here:  https://www.habitatlowerkeys.org/